Kukla's Korner Hockey

Entries with the tag: collective bargaining agreement

He wasn’t rattling a saber as he said it. He wasn’t banging a fist on the table. He was calmly answering a question with a matter-of-fact statement. Still, with the collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association expiring one year from today, he spoke volumes.

“The players made an awful lot of concessions in the last agreement,” NHLPA executive director Don Fehr said over breakfast recently in a Manhattan hotel. “It’s pretty hard to see them being willing to do that again.”

The six-year CBA, which runs until Sept. 15, 2011, gives the NHLPA the right to reopen the agreement and begin negotiations on a new one by May 15.

“I’m pretty careful not to give my opinion publicly out of respect for the players,” said NHLPA Executive Director Paul Kelly, who met with the Wild players last Tuesday in Dallas. “This is a very serious issue that we’re discussing on the fall tour.”

Every player in the NHL will receive, or has already filled out, a confidential questionnaire that will be put into a sealed envelope until all 30 teams have been surveyed. They’re being asked a yes-or-no question: “Should we terminate the CBA at the end of the current season?”

Teams have four different “roster” limits to balance under the league’s regulations; a 20-player “dressed list” for games, a 23-player active NHL roster, a 50-contract maximum, and a 90-player maximum reserve list.

Starting with the largest and working our way down, teams are only allowed to have up to 90 players on its reserve list, whether signed to a standard player contract (SPC) or unsigned. From there teams are only allowed to have up to 50 players signed to contracts for any given season, including those for the players on the active roster and injured reserve lists.

read on for a very comprehensive explanation of how roster limits work.

Note: Levin’s article is part of a series he recently started, looking the business side of the game. His previous entry addressed the basic question of What is the CBA?

Three years down the road into economic paradise, the National Hockey League has hit a roadblock.

To some, this comes as no surprise. The Collective Bargaining Agreement that was hammered out after the lockout was clearly headed for trouble. For starters, no matter how many times commissioner Gary Bettman repeated his mantra for the gullible — “We’re doing it for the fans.” — there were three reasons for that lockout, and not one of them involved the well-being of fans.

Bettman wanted (a) to consolidate his power base; (b) to solidify his game plan of expanding the league into regions not familiar with hockey; and (c) to get rid of Bob Goodenow as head of the NHL Players’ Association.

On July 22, three years will have elapsed since the NHL and the National Hockey League Players’ Association ratified a collective agreement to end the exhausting 310-day lockout that cancelled the 2004-05 season.

During the shutdown, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s favourite buzzwords were “cost certainty.” While Bettman would never publicly condone the money that several clubs tossed at players this past week, the NHL office can’t be happy about the more than $725-million (all currency U.S.) that clubs spent in the past nine days to re-up some of their own players and lure new talent.